About Me
About Kuldeep Pisda — engineering leader and former startup CTO with 6+ years building production AI systems, multi-tenant platforms, and the infrastructure underneath them.
From dorm-room hustles to systems founders bet the business on.
I’m Kuldeep — an engineering leader and former startup CTO. For 6+ years I’ve built production AI systems end-to-end: multi-LLM platforms, RAG and semantic search, voice/SMS automation, and the multi-tenant backends and infrastructure underneath them. I’ve founded engineering functions, owned architecture, SRE, and security (SOC 2), and led small teams while staying deep in the code.
It started early. In JNV Raipur’s dorms I ran a comic-book rental service at 12 — for profit. That instinct for resourceful problem-solving is still how I work.
The formative years (2016–2021)
While studying Computer Science at NIT Raipur, I co-founded CodeVector Labs, building AI products for startups, enterprises, and government bodies. The one I’m proudest of: e-Paarvai, a real-time cataract-detection platform for the Tamil Nadu government, deployed through NHM health workers — it won a NASSCOM AI Gamechanger award.
Scaling, security, and founding teams (2021–present)
- Goldcast (2021–23) — Founding engineer & founding SRE for a high-traffic live-events platform. Architected the Django/DRF backend for tens of thousands of concurrent users, migrated infrastructure to Terraform, built monitoring from scratch (New Relic, PagerDuty), and drove SOC 2 Type 1 & 2 compliance.
- CognifAI Health (2023–24) — Co-founder & CTO. Owned engineering end-to-end for a healthcare OTT/LMS platform that scaled past 20,000 users — transcoding, payments, Keycloak auth, and a Django-Admin-powered CRM/ERP on AWS.
- Tejgyan Foundation (2023–25) — Fractional CTO for a multi-product platform (OTT, LMS, ERP, donations, events). Designed a “one backend, many clients” architecture — a single Django/DRF backend behind 15+ frontends and native Android — led a ~6-person team, and built the in-house OTT media pipeline plus an AI content-intelligence layer (RAG + Hindi semantic search over 100k+ documents). The Happy Thoughts case study tells this one chapter by chapter.
- Astel Ventures (2024–25) — Primary author of a multi-LLM AI due-diligence engine (GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) and an Elasticsearch investor-matching system over 60k+ profiles.
- Avoca Labs (2025–present) — Building the core CRM data-sync engine and AI voice/SMS campaign automation on an event-driven TypeScript/Next.js stack.
Why founders work with me
A philosophy forged over 6+ years and a few 2 a.m. incidents:
- Security enables scale. Proven in Goldcast’s SOC 2 infrastructure and the in-house architecture that carried 20k+ OTT users.
- Legacy isn’t a liability. I’ve folded years of scattered legacy data into clean single-schema systems designed to hold for a decade without a rewrite.
- Your exit strategy matters. I build handover-ready teams and documentation — you shouldn’t be locked to me, or to any vendor.
Technical arsenal:
- Backend: Django/DRF (expert) · FastAPI · Node/Next.js
- AI: Agentic LLM systems (Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini) · RAG & semantic search (pgvector, Dify, Elasticsearch) · speech-to-text
- Frontend: React · Next.js · Vue
- Infra / SRE: AWS · Terraform · Docker · CI/CD · monitoring & incident response · SOC 2
Let’s build your foundation
You handle the vision — I bring the systems. I’m a good fit for:
- Non-technical founders who need a fractional CTO
- Startups hitting scaling walls (tens of thousands of users)
- Teams modernizing legacy systems without a big-bang rewrite
Let’s talk it through over chai — first round’s on me.
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Kuldeep Pisda